


Someone to Watch Over Me

by 221b_hound



Series: Guitar Man [30]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BUt she's not telling, Gen, Mrs Hudson is a BAMF, Mrs Hudson knows the secrets of Baker Street, There's more to Mrs Hudson than meets the eye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-28
Updated: 2013-01-28
Packaged: 2017-11-27 06:36:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/658990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mrs Hudson is not John and Sherlock's housekeeper, but she's a hell of a lot more than just their their landlady. She knows the secrets of Baker Street. She even keeps it a secret that she knows those secrets, even from Sherlock Holmes. That's because there's much, much more to Mrs Hudson than meets the eye.</p><p>This story overlaps with events from Silence and Lullaby and Keep Following the Heartlines.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Someone to Watch Over Me

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from the Ella Fitzgerald song of the same name.

It’s no secret that the boys of Baker Street are two halves of a whole, even if they’re not romantically involved. If people knew that they sometimes shared a bed, to keep each other sane and grounded on those nightmare nights that tear the foundations out from under them, the gossip would never cease. It barely pauses for breath as it is.

John and Sherlock stopped caring about the rumour mill long ago, of course. If Mary Morstan knew, she wouldn’t mind. Anyone who matters wouldn’t care. Anyone who’d care doesn’t really matter.

Still, Mrs Hudson keeps the secret that she _knows_ their secret, even from her boys. She wouldn’t want to make them uncomfortable, because that might make them stop, and she doesn’t want that. What they do, they _need_ to do.  Not all love is romantic, not all physical love is sexual, and Mrs Hudson will not be responsible for those two friends feeling awkward about any way they express their brotherhood.

That the world’s greatest detective doesn’t know that his landlady knows about those nights of horror, and how he and his friend look after each other, is ironic, perhaps. But Mrs Hudson is more than she appears. Sherlock Holmes knows this, though he forgets. That’s because she’s good at being more than she appears. It’s why she’s still alive.

Mrs Hudson was married to a murderer, after all, a cold-blooded killer for hire. She was, she learned soon enough, part of his cover, and she knew immediately that if Anthony Miller (aka Antonio DeMille, aka Tony the Blade, aka The Butcher of New Orleans) ever found out that she knew, she would in short order be dead and missing without a trace. Her continued ignorance gave him a shield of innocence, and kept her alive and him out of jail.

So Mrs Miller (as she was then: she reverted to a fictionalised married name afterwards, at Sherlock’s suggestion, to keep her safe from Tony’s connections) hid behind being a bit flighty, a bit scatterbrained, a bit dizzy and so very ordinary, and waited for the chance to find someone to help her save herself. Because if she’d tried to leave, Tony the Blade would have done for her.

You can’t live with someone like The Butcher for eight years, waiting for any hope of rescue, without learning things, without knowing how to watch and take note, without knowing how to be invisible when it mattered.

When the lanky boy with the bright eyes and astonishing brain had pretended to be drunk and fall against her, so that he could search the contents of her bag, Mrs Hudson knew. She knew that her rescue had come. So he fussed and picked up her things, and she fussed and helped him so that they kept dropping things, and she tapped out a nervous SOS on the back of his hand with her painted nails. Three times, so that there was no mistake about it. She’d learned a thing or two in her brief stint in the RAF after secretarial school, she had.

And Sherlock Holmes, investigating because he was bored, and meant to be rehabilitating, and owed his brother a favour, he saved her, or at least helped her to save herself. He made sure Tony the Blade got his just rewards, and he made sure that Mrs Miller, the American murderer’s British wife, didn’t have to give evidence, and that she could go home again.

Sherlock stayed in touch, after that, through some very bad times as well as better ones. She scolded him, but she fed him and let him stay on her sofa. She pretended not to see what he was doing to himself, and showed him that he mattered to her, regardless of how far he fell from grace.

In her way, Mrs Hudson helped Sherlock to save himself as well.

Then there was Baker Street, and not long after there was Dr John Watson, and it was like the family she had never had somehow willed itself into existence. From being twice-widowed (and once quite gladly) and childless, she suddenly had the sons who were so very much the kind of children she had wished for, troubled and imperfect as they are.

Mrs Hudson has been there for some of Sherlock’s worst days.  Days before John, with the drugs, in Florida and back in London; those once-a-year days going with Sherlock to see his real mother, lost in her madness. Even John doesn’t know about Mrs Holmes.

Mrs Hudson knows it’s not because Sherlock doesn’t trust John. It’s because Sherlock doesn’t want John to only know his Mummy as she is now, as she has been for ten years, babbling and deranged and lost in her own brain, the result of swallowing poisons that were supposed to kill her but failed.

Mrs Hudson thinks that Sherlock thinks John will try to make him see his mother more often, and Sherlock doesn’t want that: not because it hurts him (although it does) but because it hurts Mrs Holmes. Sherlock’s mother doesn’t know him any more, and visiting only distresses her. Sherlock’s not going to take a stranger along to frighten her, no matter that it’s John, when the appearance of her own sons frighten her to incoherent sobs and screams and pleas of _make them go away, it’s not my fault, don’t let them don’t let them no no no make them go away_.

Mrs Hudson doesn’t insist that Sherlock visit his mother, but she always goes with him on that one day each year. She sits beside him in the taxi all the way there in the hospital and talks about the weather or the news or the godawful stink he made with the latest experiment that he really ought to clean up himself, because she’s not a cleaning service, no. And afterwards, on the way home, she sits there, as quiet and solid and loving as she knows how, holding his hand, rubbing his clenched knuckles with her thumb until they get to Baker Street, and he kisses her cheek and goes inside to clean up his scientific messes.

When Moriarty came to destroy them, she held fast. When Sherlock died-but-didn’t, she held fast. She held fast through all of those phone calls from the vanishing dark, that silence that daren’t be the voice she longed to hear. With John and Mycroft, she waited and mourned and hoped.

In that year, she sang a lullaby to her lost boy when he was failing. She held to John’s hand when he needed strength. When John’s father was so vile to him that Christmas, and he too was failing and falling and so heartsick, she held him and tended him for three days, and never said a word about the drunkenness or the things he said in his despair and rage.

That’s what mothers do. They love their sons despite everything and through everything. Even when their sons are not the ones they gave birth to. (All of those sons and daughters were lost in the first trimester long ago, the children she’d longed to have and couldn’t keep in her body no matter what she tried. She didn’t carry her Sherlock and her John, but they are hers now nonetheless.)

But after the loss and the longing and the sheer brutality of helplessness, Sherlock came home. Changed. Stronger in some ways, broken in others. John was changed too, and they were reforged as new men. For a little while they were delicate, fragile – remaking themselves. So she fed them and maintained the peace for them and protected them however she could: she kept watch over them.

If Tony the Blade or that madman Moriarty had shown up in those few weeks, they may have been surprised at what a small, angry, protective older woman might be capable of in defence of her nest. Mrs Hudson would probably have been very surprised herself. Possibly the only person who would not have been surprised was Mycroft Holmes, but he’s good at keeping his own counsel and much larger secrets, so no-one will ever know the answer to that.

The thing is, Mrs Hudson doesn’t always sleep well. Her hip pains her, and she has bad dreams herself. Married to The Butcher for eight horrific years, of course she does. When she can’t sleep, she sits in her kitchen and sips chamomile tea. Before Moriarty, she would hear the boys playing music sometimes. She’d hear the murmur of voices. Of course she knows when they’re fighting, and when they’re laughing, and when Sherlock is being insufferable and when John’s _had it up to here._

After Sherlock’s return, she still heard those things, though it was a while before the laughter came back. Naturally, she heard the nightmares. Their bedroom windows face onto the back, and voices travel, especially those crying out in the small, lonely hours, when she’s sitting in her kitchen, also facing onto the back, sipping tea. Sounds also travel down the stairwell, where sometimes she sits, because she’s awake and a dread has come over her. She knows there’s nothing to it, that Tony is long dead, and so too is Moriarty, but still, she sits on the stair, like a maternal sentinel, just to satisfy herself that no-one is sneaking up to harm her or her boys.

Some nights, she has crept upstairs to their door, guided by the fear she knows is only in her head, and listens. She’s heard them play guitar and violin, softly, as though they think it won’t wake her (it often does, but she doesn’t mind).

She has heard John punch and kick walls as his sleeping body tries to run, she’s heard him cry out: _We’re under fire!_ and _Alpha Tango Charlie, evac, for God’s sake_ , and _Murray!_ and, louder, more anguished than all the others, _Sherlock! No!_ and a deep voice offering: “Wake up, John. It’s over. You’re in London” or “Breathe, John, breathe. I’m all right. I’m fine. We’re fine. See?”

She’s heard Sherlock cry out in alarm for no reason, crash as he falls out of bed or off the sofa and the breathless: “ _John? John? **John!** ” _ followed always, always, by “I’m here, right here, sshhh, you’re home” in that familiar, gentle tenor.

She’s heard her own name sometimes, and the urge to go to them is strong, but then she hears John: “You’re home. You’re in Baker street. Mrs Hudson is just downstairs. She’s fine. She’s all right.” So she doesn’t go in, because she thinks it would embarrass them, if they knew that she knew that sometimes they sleep in the same bed. Not like Mrs Turners married ones at all, which is what she first thought, but she knows what they are to each other, and what they are to her.

She knows she's part of their background. She's important to them, yes, but they don't properly notice her most of the time. Even Sherlock, who always sees everything doesn't really _see_ her. Mrs Hudson thinks he chooses not to, sometimes. She thinks he finds it soothing to not _have_ to see her like he does everything else.

Of course they think she's a little dippy. She lets them. She got very good at acting dippy to keep safe. It saved her life and Sherlock's at a crucial moment, after all, right before The Butcher was arrested.  Being harmless and unseen means she is underestimated, and she can keep an eye on them without them minding or anyone else seeing how important she is. Except for that terrible James Moriarty. Mrs Hudson doesn’t curse many people. Her murdering ex, and Jim Moriarty, though, she curses to the far reaches of hell, every day, sometimes twice for good measure.

So when Sherlock and John come to her door one morning, bearing croissants and looking like they haven’t slept in days, she knows about Sherlock’s nightmare the previous night, and that John was with him in his bedroom to soothe him back to wakefulness, and how the boys crept out of the house at 2am, and here they are again with the violin and guitar. They’ve been up to something, but something good for them. They look better than they have all week, but so tired, her boys. So she fusses, and puts them in her kitchen and doesn’t tell them that she knows about the night terrors and how they look out for each other. They don’t need to know that she knows. It’s enough that she keeps that eye on them. Makes them cakes, and does a little shopping, and potters around the house and yes, sometimes she cleans, though not the noxious substances, and not all the time. Boys will be boys but they must also not be coddled too much.

Because even though she’s not their housekeeper, Mrs Hudson is so much more than their landlady.


End file.
